As home networks become more sophisticated, service providers are looking to deploy and manage more intelligent devices in the subscriber's network. A number of services can be offered by such devices including Video on Demand (VoD), Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Wireless-Fidelity (Wi-Fi) for a wireless Local Area Network (LAN), or a combination of services such as Wi-Fi VoIP. It is often desirable for service providers to offer service-branded Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) through traditional retail channels where the CPE requires a manual registration by a subscriber in order to create an account and activate service. An example of such service is a VONAGE™ branded LINKSYS® CPE for VoIP service.
During a traditional registration process, the service provider needs to associate the subscriber's account with a specific CPE in order to subsequently manage the CPE's configuration and service. Some service providers require the user to go through a manual process of entering a device identifier printed on the back of the device, for example, in order to identify the CPE. VONAGE® is one example of a service provider that requires this of their subscribers. However, this process is tedious and error-prone resulting in poor customer experiences and increased support costs when a subscriber encounters some difficulty with registration.
While some access networks allow a network service provider to identify the device through physical topology or interaction with a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) interaction, this is not always possible. Independent service providers like VONAGE® do not provide the physical lines and may not be involved in providing Internet Protocol (IP) address assignments to such CPEs. This makes identifying the subscriber device even more difficult in these situations. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for use in identifying a subscriber's customer premises equipment (CPE) during registration without requiring manual entry of the CPE identification information or reliance upon indicators such as network topology or DHCP interaction.
Embodiments of the present invention and their advantages are best understood by referring to the detailed description that follows. It should be appreciated that like reference numerals are used to identify like elements illustrated in the figures.